The current wheeled brick meta has long been an annoyance to any non-brick player, and the devs have done nothing to change it, but that’s because I don’t think they quite know how.
Nerfing parts will destroy the brick meta… or will it? The metaslaves will always find a way around it, and it would make the nerfed parts useless on their own.
So I propose a change to the movement physics (again…): the heavier a vehicle, the more inertia it has. While this does already happen to some extent, it doesn’t happen in the way it should. I think that 24 ton bricks should be near impossible to steer or stop at full speed (slide around a lot), making them very difficult to use. You need tank/armored tracks to have full control, with the great wheeled and small/hardened track performance reserved for small, lighter vehicles like buggies or some larger cars.
This change would nerf bricks by making them impossible to play, make tracks a bit more relevant, and encourage smaller vehicles, while avoiding nerfing the parts directly so they can still be used on their own.
There is a bunch of small changes in the upcoming balance patch that are clearly aimed at the heavy shotgun brick meta.
Not all of them are the changes I would have made, but I think all of them together may be enough to make them less dominant.
The nerfs to hammerfalls, breakers, and gravastars alone should have an impact, but they are also making changes to finwhale, yeti, and omamori, which should effect a lot of the brick meta.
Edit: regarding inertia, I do agree that they need to tweak it a bit to make it more realistic. I think extra mass is boosting traction a bit too much. Light vehicles slide way too easily, and heavy vehicles grip too much. They just need to dial back the effect of mass on handling, and for all parts. I suspect that the problems that legs have on hills is probably related to this parameter.
Wheels op, too much grip, too much dura, too lightweight, perks too good.
Brick weapons are too small and lightweight for their damage output and energy cost so they get 1500+ free cab HP worth of mass limit. This goes for all shotguns, fire, melee, etc.
Wheels are never OP to begin with lmao, they never have any proper grip, I use almost exclusively APC wheels and there are no grips when you got T-boned by firedogs. Has there any actual grip for the wheels everyone would’ve picked surface traction instead of either power or tonnage.
For the brick weapons, they’re either undermount shotguns or hammerfalls on omamori. You treat all undermounting bricks like regular melee and properly nerf Omamori. And
That sounds like a Fin Whale issue. Fin Whale is being nerfed next patch with reduced speed bonus.
I have multiple fused wheels with different perks of the same tire and the only thing i can tell you about the traction perk is that it makes your turns more responsive and accurate and less like a slidey drift car. Probably helps climb slopes but not exactly sure… feels kinda like it does…
I run full traction wheel perks on my main 12 Boom death dealer… and it helps me weave tighter with less back end drift.
If epic wheels are not OP why do they have the best stats and synergy perks everywhere? The devs even had to blanket buff special wheel dura even tho it wasnt necessary just because of how powercrept epic wheels have become. Special wheels were fine & their dura buff should be reverted, its the epic wheels that cause the problems.
For brick weapons just look at the ratios of kg/hp and their size for how much damage they do. A Typhoon/Mast has to carry 4400+kg for 24 energy worth of firepower while a breaker or draco has less than half of that and it still has plenty of DPS as a 20 energy weapon. Cannons only cost you 2000 cab hp because of their mass its no big deal. Its no big deal that small and hard to hit weapons benefit more from omamori than something like a typhoon or mastodon which get hit every time they are aimed at.
How do you not see a problem with bricks going as fast as they do without finwhale when they got 4k+ cab hp? When bricks can go almost as fast as light dogs theres no reason to play light and fast stuff.
At the CC level, I see lots of APC and shivs on bricks. If you want to use Finwhale and omamori on a brick at that PS, you need to find the PS somewhere.
As far as epic wheels and grip, it really depends on your speed and mass, and the number of wheels you are using. Lightweight fast cars on four wheels slide all over the place, especially on sand and ice maps.
I think they need dial back some of the effects that mass has on handling, which they seem to have introduced in the 2.0 update. Don’t eliminate them completely, as they do give some extra realism and immersion, but make the effect less intense. Currently it just feels so exaggerated that it breaks immersion, rather than reinforcing it.
Shivs make sense, they have melee damage, and APC wheels I think lower the PS while still retaining some dura. All epic wheeled bricks I’ve seen are over 10k PS at a minimum, and CC is restricted to 8k, if I can remember right.
This is an effort of dev’s to bring parity with omni directional wheels. Omni-directional movement is still “better”.
I agree with you, the vast difference in weight of weapons creates a nearly insurmountable gap.
The base problem is omni-directional parts. Wheels went un-used because the advantage of being able to move sideways outshined wheels. So they buffed wheels.
If all the omni-directional parts were legendary and had legendary PS it would help them balance wheels. (I kinda think they should be legendary, with hovers moved to relic tbh) Then epic wheels could be balanced.
This is very true and why I really want to see all wheels get unconditional full reverse speed and diagonal steering. We have vehicles with full wheel steering it makes no sense for them not to have Q/E give them independent all wheel steer, its just a matter of reversing the direction the axle steers rofl. The devs could go even further and give wheels differential braking so they could properly drift so you could come sliding around a corner at 70+km/h sideways with a wheeled typhoon. They would become so much more usable for every build and it would afford people the ability to reverse away from dogs and start playing long range weapons on wheels. Wheels have a low skill ceiling issue that other movement parts don’t have. People might think I hate wheels and never want to play them or be beaten by them but its really the opposite; I want to be able to use them for every build I have but I simply cant because they’ve been pigeonholed into dog-exclusive movement parts. Only ever good at W+M1.
If I look at my gameplay where I carry games or solo dogs I’m always reversing away and pressing T to flash look backwards, I never need a huge firing arc and so diagonal steering with wheels and full reverse speed suddenly means its extremely viable to play a wheeled typhoon or scorp in CW.
TLDR wheels are the lowest skill ceiling movement parts in the game and they need full reverse speed and Q/E diagonal strafing
